Asian history Books

Moving beyond past histories of Viet Nam that have focused on nationalist struggle, this volume brings together work by scholars who are re-examining centuries of Vietnamese history. Crossing borders and exploring ambiguities, the essays in Viet Nam:...

How do the temporal features of sacred music affect social life in South Asia? Due to new time constraints in commercial contexts, devotional musicians in Bengal have adapted longstanding features of musical time linked with religious practice to promote...

This book approaches the concept of tenkō (political conversion) as a response to the global crisis of interwar modernity, as opposed to a distinctly Japanese experience in postwar debates.Tenkō connotes the expressions of ideological conversion...

Series Header: The SYB FactBook Series This is an exciting new series of books for the general reader from the editor and publishers of one of the world's most respected reference books--The Statesman's Yearbook. The FactBooks present everything you need...

This book offers the first in-depth history of the greatest diplomatic challenge in the post-Cold War era-the North Korean nuclear program and the US and allied efforts to stop it. Michael J. Mazarr explains why North Korea may believe it needs nuclear...

If Chairman Mao came back to life today, what would he think of Nanjing's bookstore, the Librairie Avant-Garde, where it is easier to find primers on Michel Foucault's philosophy than copies of the Little Red Book? What does it really mean to order a...

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of commentaries and reflections on Japanese culture, first published in 1904, was written shortly after the return of two English aristocrats from five years spent immersed in the 'Land of the Rising Sun'. Their intention through these...

This unusual and interesting book is a fascinating account of the world of Chinese writing. It examines Chinese space and the political and social use of writing as propaganda, a publicity booster and as a ladder for social climbing.

First published in 2001. This is Volume XI of the Foreign Policies of the Great Powers eleven part series and focuses on the policies of the Japanese, from 1869 to 1942. It includes sections on the Iwakura period, the Mutsu period, Aoki, Komura, Kato,...

This is an invaluable work looking into new areas relating to India's princely states. Based on an abundance of rarely used archival material, the book sheds new light on diversities related to the princely states such as health policies and practices,...

The Japanese have long regarded themselves as a homogenous nation, clearly separate from other nations. However, this long-standing view is being undermined by the present international reality of increased global population movement. This has resulted...

Despite their small area, the southern islands of Japan can be seen as stepping stones towards a more nuanced view of cultural osmosis between Japan and the outside world. This book presents an ethnographic portrayal of the people of the Southern Ryukyu...

The controversy over official state-approved history textbooks in Japan, which omit or play down many episodes of Japan's occupation of neighbouring countries during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), and which have been challenged by critics who favour...

This book examines the Russian conquest of the ancient Central Asian khanates of Bukhara and Khiva in the 1860s and 1870s, and the relationship between Russia and the territories until their extinction as political entities in 1924. It shows how Russia's...

It has been customary in the appraisal of the different approaches to the study of Japan anthropology to invoke an East-West dichotomy positing hegemonic 'Western' systems of thought against a more authentic 'Eastern' alternative. Top scholars in the...

As the United States was drawn into the Second World War, pressure grew from a number of nations for India's independence. Prime Minister Churchill, in Britain's name, engaged deliberately in propaganda in the United States to persuade the American...

This book explores the relationship between the United States and the Malaysian economy, concentrating on the period 1870 to 1957, with particular focus on trade flows and foreign direct investment. This is the first book to examine, in depth, US...

Paradoxically, Japan provides massive amounts of development aid to China, despite Japan's clear perception of China as a prime competitor in the Asia-Pacific region. This clearly written and comprehensive volume provides an overview of the way Japan's...

An account of the re-emergence of Persia as a world player and the reassertion of its cultural, political and spiritual links with Turkic Lands, this book opposes the way in which, for too long, the whole period of Mongol domination of Iran has been...

Security and Migration in Asia explores how various forms of unregulated and illegal forms of human movement within Asia and beyond the region have come to be treated as 'security' issues, and whether and how a 'securitization' framework enables a...

Investigating the dynamics of balancing patterns in the Asia-Pacific, this book focuses particularly on the contribution of great powers and middle powers to regional stability. Taking the US and China as great powers, and using ASEAN, Russia, Australia...

Regionalism in Southeast Asia provides the reader with an historical analysis of Southeast Asia from the distinct perspective of regionalism. Southeast Asian history is usually written from a national point of view, which underplays the links...

Intra-Asian trade is a major theme of recent writing on Asian economic history. From the second half of the nineteenth century, intra-Asian trade flows linked Asia into an integrated economic system, with reciprocal benefits for all participants. But...

Okinawan people have developed a unique tradition of protest in their long history of oppression and marginalization. Beginning with the Ryukyu Kingdom's annexation to Japan in the late nineteenth century, Miyume Tanji charts the devastation...

Isaac Titsingh was intermittently head of the Japan factory (trading station) of the Dutch East India Company 1780-94. He was a career merchant, but unusual in having a classical education and training as a physician. His impact in Japan was enormous,...

Developments in East Asia have progressed rapidly in terms of regionalism since the 1997 crisis. The end of the Asian miracle called into question not only the capacity of regional states to meet the needs of their attendant peoples, but also challenged...

Nationalisms in Japan brings together leading specialists in the field to discuss how notions of 'nationalism' in modern Japan impinges on all aspects of social, political and cultural understanding of the Japanese nation or the Japanese state. This book...

A fresh historical and theoretical exploration of the much-debated, but still elusive, question of the Korean divide. In contrast to much of the literature on the divide, which deals with state-building on the two sides of the Demilitarized Zone,...

This book originally examines how prominent communist intellectuals in China during the revolutionary period (1921 to 1940) constructed and presented identities for themselves and how they narrated their place in the revolution.

This book examines the development of Thailand from the integration of Siam into the European world economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, up to the emergence of Thailand as a modern nation state in the twentieth century. It concentrates in...

Since the fall of the Suharto regime, forces pressing for regional autonomy have strengthened in Indonesia, with some people arguing that the country is in danger of disintegrating. This book examines a range of issues connected with decentralization and...

Providing original insights into Chinese military history, Nicola Di Cosmo gives an annotated translation of the only known military diary in pre-modern Chinese history, providing fresh and extensive information on the inner workings of the...

One prevalent socio-cultural structure that is peculiar to South Asia is caste, which is broadly understood in socio-anthropological terms as an institution of ranked, hereditary and occupational groups. This book discusses the enigmatic persistence of...

There are many different kinds of sub-national conflicts across Asia, with a variety of causes, but since September 11, 2001 these have been increasingly portrayed as part of the global terrorist threat, to be dealt with by the War on Terror. This major...

While pre-modernity is often considered to be the 'time' of non-European regions and modernity is seen as belonging to the West, this book seeks to transcend the temporal bifurcation of that world history into 'pre-modern' and 'modern', as well as...

The quest for gentility has shaped Chinese civilization and the formation of culture in China until the present day. This book analyzes social aspirations and cultural practices in China from 1550 to 1999, showing how the notion of gentility has evolved...

This book explores how issues of ethics in war and warfare have been treated by major ethical traditions of Asia. It opens a discussion about whether there are universal standards in the ideologies of warfare between the major religious traditions of the...

Incorporating Japanese language materials and field-based research, this compelling collection of essays takes a comparative look at the changing notions of gender and sexual diversity in Japan, considering both heterosexual and non-heterosexual...

Asia has long been an ideological battleground between capitalism and communism, between nationalism and Westernisation and between the nation-state and globalization. This book is a history of the Asian region from 1945 to the present day which...

China's one-child population policy, first initiated in 1979, has had an enormous effect on the country's development. By reducing its fertility in the past two decades to less than two children per woman, and developing a family planning program focused...

This book explores the play of international forces and international ideas about Shanghai, looking backward as far as its transformation into a subdivided treaty port in the 1840s, and looking forward to its upcoming hosting of China's first World's...

Highlighting diverse types of market places and merchants, this book situates the commercial scenario of early India (up to c. ad 1300) in the overall agrarian material milieu of the subcontinent. The book questions the stereotypical narrative of early...

Frank David Ascoli's Revenue History of Sundarbans during the Period 1870- 1920 looks at the area bounded on the north by the limits of Permanent Settlement in 24-Parganas, Khulna and Bakarganj districts and on the south by the sea face stretching from...

This study on Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee will help the readers understand the circumstances under which he assumed the leading role in the carving out the province of West Bengal from the littoral that was soon to become the province of East Pakistan.The...

The momentous interaction between Portugal and Kerala com­menced with the historic voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1498. It had lasting impact on the society of Kerala. The voyage, with the express purpose of searching for 'Christians and Spices', left...

The Sundarban stretches from the brackish waters of the broad Hooghly on the west, to the fresh waters of the still broader Meghna to the east; the turbid waters of the Bay of Bengal on its southern limits, to the zamindari or pargana lands on its...